2014’s top 10 moments in science

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I’m not going to say it. The most logical (and also probably the most accurate) way to start any overview of a full year in the development of human mastery of the universe is to say that it’s been a “big year” — and it has.

Still, since mass communication created the modern research community, basically every year has hosted some insight or breakthrough that could give it a real claim to greatness. You already know that 2014 was no exception to this rule, but the sheer volume of groundbreaking news this year may have overwhelmed you.

So, here’s a recap to help you remember just why you spent the last 12 months so constantly excited…

Rosetta successfully lands on a comet, studies Earth history

Landing on the Moon makes sense. It, and planets like Mars and Venus, hang heavy in the sky and seem to challenge the human imagination to not plan a visit someday — but who sees a comet blazing through the night sky and thinks, “I could land on that”?

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission successfully landed a piece of human technology on a comet in 2014. It’s a mission that would have seemed like utter fantasy just a decade ago. It’s a practical milestone for the human species, making available to us the whole array of objects in our solar system, but it’s also a stab at understanding the universe itself.

The mission’s Philae lander ran into problems, but even in a partially crippled state it could still return enough data to have a major impact on multiple areas of science. One major theory about Earth’s development says that the majority of its water arrived in the form of ice in comets like that Rosetta targetted, but analysis of the comet’s water ice showed that it is chemically quite different from the water found on Earth. With wildly different levels of the hydrogen isotope deuterium, it’s unlikely that this type of comet brought a significant amount of water to early Earth.

We can’t know what further information might be gleaned from the partially crippled lander, but you can bet that scientists will be hanging on every bit they can get.

We can now edit the genome of living, adult animals

It’s very nice to be able to edit a strand of DNA in a test tube, or even a living bacterium, but for years we’ve been hearing about the promise of gene therapy as to cure diseases in real, living animals. For years, we’ve been able to swap a diseased liver gene in a sperm cell for a healthy version, then allow that sperm cell to go on and make a healthy baby — but that’s very different from waiting until that baby is born and only then doing the editing, because then the gene must be changed in every cell in its body — or in every liver cell, at the very least.

This year, scientists took an enormous step toward having that ability, using the CRISPR enzymatic system to swap copies of a liver gene in adult rodents. The process still has a fairly low “infection” rate, meaning only a minority of the cells get the healthy gene, but the corrected cells then go on to out-compete their natural, diseased sisters and eventually dominate the liver, curing the disease. Not every cell or disease type will offer this mechanism to nicely increase the infection rate over time, so further research will need to work on improving the fidelity of our cell targeting mechanisms. Still, this is an enormous proof of concept: mankind can now manipulate genes to change the very nature of a living animal. 2015, here we come.

Could organ regeneration and young blood transfusions end aging?

When companies like Google start investing billions in life extension, you know it’s not just a pipe dream. We’re not necessarily talking about Futurama-style cryogenics, but anything that will reliably increase lifespan — that encompasses everything from drug development to big data health tracking. Calico was not the source of either of the year’s two biggest steps forward for anti-aging, however, as more and more international researchers start making rapid progress. There may be some skepticism about extreme life extension techniques, but basic medical science is progressing to the point that it seems no less fantastical.

One team from Scotland managed to regenerate an aged thymus to a more youthful state simply by kickstarting production of a gene called FOXN1, a breakthrough that even makes the nascent practice of growing organs for transplantation seem primitive. This actually tracked an adult thymus back to a youthful state, effectively de-aged it without anything more invasive than a needle. Even more incredible, a separate team of researchers has found that infusions of young blood can actually reverse several signifiers of aging in adults — a rather grisly finding that will certainly be refined until scientists know precisely which factors are causing the effect. Increasingly, we’re treating time like a disease, and aging as its symptoms — by treating those symptoms effectively enough, could we actually end death? We need to start thinking now about what that might mean.